Thursday, December 29, 2011

Why Your Small Business Needs A Mobile Website

By Keshav Basnet


If a SOHO business is going to contest with larger corporations they have to exploit each opportunity that comes their way, and this includes having a mobile website. Small business success seems to be more about building relations than it is about spending great amounts of promoting greenbacks. It is also about being prepared to move with the times and to become early adopters. Unlike huge companies, small businesses usually do not need to go through the heaps of red tape to get decisions made. Well, a decision that each small enterprise is going to be forced to make, earlier instead of later , is to get their company web sites to become mobile friendly.

Today, more people are using smartphone and keyboard-less devices to surf the Net than those that still use the traditional desktop PC. A recent Neilson survey showed that of the adults who purchased a new telephone in the previous 3 months, an astonishing 55% of them acquired a smartphone. That figure was up 34% from the 12 months earlier. Further researched shows that 87% of smartphone users check their e-mail and the Net from these devices daily. If that does not set your alarm bells ringing, the same research went on to say that 25% of smartphone users say that they mainly log on using their smartphone rather than employing a computer. The reason behind this? Probably because a smartphone gives us that immediate gratification that we all seem to be searching for these days. So ignore these stats at your hazard, and say ciao to the prospective customers who belong to this group.

If you're not convinced a mobile website is what your company needs , then you were probably one of the group of business owners who at first said that their company did not need a regular internet site and could depend on the old glossy trifold brochures and the Yellow Pages. These days, every serious business owns at least a particularly basic web site which details their services and products and has some kind of contact form.

So why won't your current website meet the wants of these smartphone users. The probabilities are your present internet site will be identifiable on these types of devices. But the fact that they're not designed and made specially for these devices it implies that the visitor isn't going to be a really good one. Web sites designed for desktop computers are often terribly rich graphically, they contain plenty of scrolling and are generally designed for the user to get around using a mouse. That isn't what folk are looking for when they visit a site using a mobile gizmo. They want the site to load very swiftly, there should be little or ideally no scroll, and accept it or not, little text. Everything is icon driven and there should be sufficient text to ensure your visitor has enough info to follow some sort of call to action e.g. Call you, fill in a form or buy something. That's it! Avoid Flash technology, because not all smartphones have the power to view Flash. Have few, but well optimised graphics that load quickly and make certain that any visitor to your mobile site can simply navigate their way thru the site, using their finger. Point and click!

The undeniable fact that these folk are employing a smartphone, whose main functionality is definitely making telephone calls. Make it simple for people to click on icon and have their smartphone automatically call your business.

You'll have heard about the .mobi domain TLD, which is the mobile version of the .com or .net kinds of TLD. But it's really not necessary for you to build up your mobile website on another domain. Why confuse your clients? Simply include smart code in your main internet site which notices that the platform that is being employed to head to the site. If it sense that a specific visitor is using a mobile gizmo then the code will ensure the mobile version of the site is brought up on the screen rather than their usual internet site.

One final piece of guidance, now that I am sure you agree you need to have a mobile website, once the site has been built, don't forget to submit it to the various mobile directories. Now going mobile with your website is a choice, but at some point soon it is going to be just as crucial to your business as a regular website is today.




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